Abstract
Tasker provides an overview of the cinematic construction of military women, using examples from US and UK film. Looking first at Second World War she demonstrates that military women are celebrated in film for their patriotism while at the same time films seek to reassure audiences that women’s service does not challenge either military masculinity or conventional gender norms more broadly. Moving on, Tasker addresses more recent films and specifically their handling of combat exclusions, before concluding with an analysis of war/science fiction cinema. Such films find a place for military women in future world or crisis scenarios. Tasker’s work here underlines the complex ways in which cultural forms such as cinema make sense of (and stories out of) real-world tensions.
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- 1.
The first two sections of this chapter draw from my book, Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since WWII (Tasker 2011). The book offers more detailed discussion of the films mentioned here along with television and news media portrayals of military women.
- 2.
The acronym WAVES, meaning Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, indicates the exceptional character of military labour envisaged at this point.
- 3.
While the US Marine Corps refused this pattern of separate services for women a telling recruitment features a female marine holding a clipboard and pen beside an aircraft. The strapline reads ‘Be A Marine, Free A Marine to Fight’ emphasising that male marines provide the fighting force supplemented by women’s labour.
- 4.
To clarify, while This Above All is a British-set adaptation of a British novel, it is nonetheless an American film. Indeed, its overarching themes of a Britain slowly overcoming its hierarchical class system due to wartime necessity speaks directly to American discourses about Britain.
- 5.
Homecoming ends with the death of its heroic military woman, Snapshot (Lana Turner), following her affair with a married Doctor (Clark Gable). Flight Nurse concludes with Polly Davis (Joan Leslie) rejecting marriage in favour of her military career and her patriotic duty to the injured. Both films suggest that romance and marriage are at odds with the military woman; while numerous American movies emphasise the difficulties experienced by military men in maintaining a connection with their families, these themes rarely have the prominence or significance that they are accorded in relation to military women.
- 6.
I use post-war here in the conventional sense of the period following Second World War. Of course, the US was at war in Korea when two of these films were made and released.
- 7.
Rikke Schubart (2009) frames the Lynch media coverage – including the presentation of her in action hero terms – in terms of national gender myths that she regards as unchanging.
- 8.
US television has been rather more engaged with military women in series such as MASH, JAG or Over There.
- 9.
- 10.
An example of issues-focused television movies would be Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story (1995) exploring lesbian servicewomen or She Stood Alone: The Tailhook Scandal (1995) dealing with a high-profile sexual harassment case in the US Navy.
- 11.
I’m thinking here of Cynthia Enloe’s (2000) observation that strategies to increase recruitment of women are balanced by a concern not to alienate ‘masculinity-seeking men’ from military service. Similarly in cinema, female performers in war stories rarely if ever displace their higher-paid male counterparts.
- 12.
The film, it should be noted, was a commercial failure.
- 13.
Christine Cornea offers a useful discussion of the differences between the two female leads in terms of the conventions of the female hero (Dizzy), on one hand, the femme fatale (Carmen), on the other. Cornea suggests that audiences, who reacted in testing negatively to the former, were by that point familiar with ‘a number of well-known female hero characters and were more used to witnessing these active women on screen’ (2007: 169).
References
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Tasker, Y. (2009) ‘Comic Situations/Endless War: M*A*S*H and War as Entertainment’. In Rikke Schubart, Fabian Virchow, Debra White-Stanley and Tanja Thomas (Eds.) War Isn’t Hell, It’s Entertainment: Essays on Visual Media and the Representation of Conflict. Jefferson: McFarland, pp. 132–149.
Tasker, Y. (2011) Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television Since WWII. Durham: Duke University Press.
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Tasker, Y. (2017). Military Women in Cinema: War Stories and Future Worlds. In: Woodward, R., Duncanson, C. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Gender and the Military. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51677-0_30
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